Just got finished posting all the 2011 income and expenses in Quicken. Once again, we managed to come out in the black, although I'm sure Betty will find some depreciation or something that we can take that will knock it back down to $0. I'm a little bit frustrated. I was hoping for a little bigger number than last year, but gas prices and chickens in the garden both took a bigger bite out of the pie this year than they did last year.
We finally made the decision that we need to raise our egg prices. We make about $1/doz over our basic costs, but when we add in the cost of getting them to the stores, we wind up only making about $4-5/hour and that's not cutting it. Thankfully there's a big demand for our eggs out there. We just can't keep up with it. Our stores are telling us they are running out of the eggs we deliver every two weeks within 4 days! We are in dire need of more land and more buildings. If we could deliver all the eggs our stores could handle, it would sure cut down on our mileage costs per dozen!
We plan to put up higher fences this year so the chickens don't get into the gardens. Grampa Tom wasn't willing to spend the thousands of dollars it would take to re-fence the place, but a couple of months ago I came up with an idea to use the existing fence as a base and then extend it with pvc pipe and netting. Should be able to do everything we need to with less than $1000.
Besides the fencing, we are planning to concentrate on just the higher demand garden produce this year. We plan to grow more tomatoes and sweet corn and we're going to try our hand at growing specialty berries that produce high dollars per acre like black berries, elderberries and black currants. If we can do a good job on the little patches that we put in here at the home place, we'll expand by replacing some of our row crop land up at our son's with them.
The last couple of years have been pretty cold and wet for the garden. Hopefully this warm dry spell that started last summer will last through the spring so we can get things started earlier and have something to sell when the markets start! That will make a big difference. We have the ability now to irrigate that we didn't have last summer when the heat shut everything down so even if it lasts all summer, we should do OK.
I'm planning to take a food service manager's course this spring so we can work toward adding value to more of what we produce. The laws in Illinois have changed so it is a little easier for small businesses who process and produce foods. It's still not easy, but before the regulations were so burdensome that only businesses that were capable of high volume could afford the costs. The thing is you can't start out doing millions of dollars of business! And there's so much less risk of contamination in a small business where the owners do most of the work. In a huge company if an employee does a sloppy job, it's unlikely he will be found out and he risks the loss of his job at most. But, if the owner of a small business is sloppy, he can't get business to begin with with and if he slacks off after building the business up, he risks not only his business, but his home, his way of life, everything.
Our goal for next year? To have to pay income taxes on the farm! And I hope you wind up having to pay lots of income taxes too, not because the tax rates raise, but because you make more!
God Bless You All!
~Grama Sue
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